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This article analyses UK Early Years policy in terms of service expansion and service transformation since the Labour Government's election in 1997. Childcare is now a matter of public policy, driven largely by concerns about child poverty and inequalities in children's life chances. The evidence is considered, first, on service expansion, increased take‐up and increased employment by parents with young children, and, second, on service transformation and child outcomes: to what extent have changes benefited disadvantaged children, families and neighbourhoods? The Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) research shows that pre‐school can boost disadvantaged children's intellectual development in particular, and the article concludes that programmes such as Sure Start and Neighbourhood Nurseries have been successfully targeted at the most disadvantaged areas, although better‐off families and neighbourhoods may have benefited even more, and that problems of cost and sustainability remain. It is too early to judge whether better integrated services now being developed will be successful in transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged children.

Early years policy and services have been subjected to substantial and rapid reform over the past 20 years. This article provides a brief overview of legislative and policy changes over this period, with a particular focus on regulation and workforce issues, and traces the enduring influence of the Children Act 1989 to the present. It identifies a paradigm shift in early years services from a world view based on public health and care and on devolution of responsibility, to one in which promoting children's learning and development is core and centralised regulation and national standards are seen as essential. This is reflected in changed responsibilities at government department and regulatory body level. Despite these major changes, the article concludes that the key principles of the Act ‐ in terms of children's rights, parents' responsibilities, listening to children and inter‐agency co‐operation ‐ are still apparent.

Kirklees Early Years Services encompasses all early childhood services from nursery education, day nurseries, and regulation and support of the private and voluntary sector – playgroups, childminders and private and voluntary day nurseries. Reflects on the financial difficulties of running an integrated early years service, difficulties compounded by the lack of comparable financial statistics and conflicts about cost effectiveness across different kinds of services.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the individual and interaction effects of chief executive officers (CEO)-chairman leadership structure (CEO duality) and CEO-serviced early years (the first three years in office) on real earnings management (REM) through sales activities of listed firms in the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET).

The longitudinal data on CEO and chairman names of 3,825 firm-year observations were manually gleaned from the SET market analysis and reporting tool and the annual reports from 2001 to 2015. Multiple regressions were utilized to analyze the effects.

The findings show a positive relationship between CEO duality and sales-driven REM. However, the CEO-serviced early years have no association with sales-driven REM. The CEO duality/serviced early year interaction effect is positively correlated to sales manipulation. In addition, firms with the CEO duality engage in upward or downward sales-driven REM, while firms with newly appointed CEO adopt only the upward sales-driven REM. In firms which their newly appointed CEO concurrently serves as chairman, either upward or downward sales-driven REM strategy is introduced.

The findings provide some grounds for capital market and regulators to exercise caution when it comes to firms with the newly appointed CEO and/or the CEO duality, given a high tendency to manipulate sales revenues.

This study is the first to investigate the relationship between the CEO duality/serviced early years on sales-driven REM. The findings are expected to complement existing publications on REM.

The paper discusses the “narrative practices” utilised by women leading in a small sample of Early Years services in the North East of England. These Early Years settings are presented as an alternative site for studying women's experiences of leadership. It examines the way in which these women use narrative strategies and approaches to work in collaborative, community based services for young children and their families.

The study is drawn from a larger study into narratives of professional identity and their relation to interactional contexts. The study follows an interpretive paradigm, and used narrative and participative methodology and methods to work with a small number of participants purposively sampled from cohorts of the National Professional Qualification in Integrated Centre Leadership (NPQICL). Participants were involved in reflective conversations about their leadership supported by interactive, visual methods in five extended sessions over the course of twelve months. Data from the larger study which related to the theme of “narrative practices” was subsequently coded and interpreted to inform this study.

Data coded as “narrative practices” led to the establishment of three high level categories of narrative practice found in the study. These are summarised in the metaphors of “tent making” (creating and using symbolic and narrative space with others), “skilled dancing” (improvising, and remembering with others) and “orchestration” (reflexive attuning). Data suggests that women involved in the study drew on their experience and values to develop sophisticated narrative practices that were particularly adaptive, ethically sensitive and sustainable – often in spite of “official” masculine leadership cultures.

This specific study only draws on narrative accounts of three women leaders in Early Years services and as such is not intended to generate generalizable theory. The intention of the study is to conceptualise women's leadership as narrative practice, and in so doing to direct further study into these practices as aspects of effective leadership.

The study develops new ways of conceptualising and interpreting women's leadership practices and opens up opportunities for further study in this field. Access to this material also provides individuals (including women leading in UK Early Years services) and opportunity for reflection on their own leadership practice.

This study is unique in using a form of highly participative, reflective methodology to consider women's use of narrative in leadership interactions in the UK Early Years sector. The study is the first in this sector to look at this specific topic using aspects of Ricoeur's (1984) narrative hermeneutics and in so doing generates new questions about women's narrative practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the discursive rationalities shaping Irish child policy, with a particular focus on the rationality of “better with less” and its association with an intensified focus on the early years. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis there was a shift towards universal provision of early years services as part of the better with less agenda – the paper critically examines the assumptions which shaped this policy reform.

The paper is based on analysis of the texts of the two national child policy plans produced to date in Ireland – The Children, Their Lives 2000–2010 and Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures 2014–2020.

Ireland adopted its first national children’s strategy The Children, Their Lives in 2000, associated with an initial shift to a more technocratic, investment-oriented approach to policy making. The emphasis on economic returns is more strongly evident in the successor adopted in 2014. Informed by the “better with less” agenda Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures has a strong focus on early years provision as offering the most significant potential for returns, particularly in relation to “disadvantaged” children. This position not only objectifies children but is associated with a set of assumptions about the nature of “disadvantage” and those affected by it which ignores the wider context of unequal social, political and economic relations.

National children’s strategies have not been explicitly looked at previously as a form of governmentalization of government and there has been limited analysis to date in Ireland or elsewhere of the better with less agenda in the context of child policy, gaps which this paper seeks to address.

The purpose of the paper is to consider the opportunities and difficulties in developing health‐promotion work in early years settings in the UK.

As the first study of its kind conducted in the UK, a multi‐method approach was adopted involving: an overview of health‐related guidance and of effective interventions in early years settings to promote health among young children; 26 interviews with key informants in the early years and health fields, regional coordinators for the National Healthy Schools Programme (NHSP) and Foundation Stage regional advisers; a survey of 145 local Healthy Schools Programme coordinators with a response rate of 75 per cent; and six case studies of early years settings representing promising practice in the promotion of health and wellbeing.

There is considerable enthusiasm for health promotion work within early years organisations, and interest in developing such work in early years settings. The study suggests that building on existing early years curriculum frameworks, developing partnerships between health and early years professionals, engaging both parents and practitioners, and adequate national and local resourcing will facilitate development of health promoting work in the early years sector.

This paper and the outputs from the study offer useful evidence for health and early years professionals who are developing health‐promoting work in early years settings.

The paper reports on the first study of its kind in which the perceptions of both early years and health professionals are brought together to consider the issues involved in developing healthy early years practice.

Looks at the author′s work as a co‐ordinator of early years services in an authority which has not integrated care and education provision. Her job is to liaise between the education and social work departments of the local authority, and to persuade and negotiate for changes in practice. In the absence of a true corporate strategy she has focused her efforts on working in the private and voluntary sector – often neglected in the power broking of local authority services – and on the creation of single‐issue projects to further the development of co‐ordinated services.

Ireland has suddenly become a hub of activity around children's services ‐ at central and local government levels, involving the primary statutory and voluntary agencies, and engaging some of the more disadvantaged communities. In the first article in the series, Sylda Langford (2007) described the origins and work of the Office of the Minister for Children (OMC), of which she is Director General. In the second article, Michael Little and Ali Abunimah (2007) considered the role of $200 million philanthropic investment in the reforms, specifically a 10‐year programme of work funded by Atlantic Philanthropies to encourage strategy development and service design to improve outcomes for children on the island of Ireland. Part of that investment is being made in what are called ‘community engagement sites’ ‐ economically disadvantaged communities with a child population of between 3,000 and 7,000. In this article, Katherine Zappone examines the reform process at local level as the leader in one of the community engagement sites. She describes the approach they took and products of the work so far and discusses problems and opportunities that have been encountered along the way. The next (and last) article in the series (by a leading figure in the voluntary sector) will put the reforms into the context of the evolution of children's services in Ireland over the last 20 years.The first section of this article draws on the Tallaght Strategy document, written by Katherine in dialogue with a research team, followed by an edited transcript of Katherine's interview.

The articles in this issue have highlighted some of the confusions surrounding early years services. The consensus seems to be that providing more nursery education is not a sufficient solution, even if it could be afforded. What other options are possible? Looks very briefly at two different systems of early childhood services, in Denmark and Spain, and considers some of their implications for the UK.